- South Africa: Labour Unions Urge Workers to Shun Anti-Migrant Protests
Source: US News & World Report
“South Africa’s biggest labour unions on Wednesday urged workers not to participate in anti-immigrant protests that have seized the country, and said they could face consequences if they skip work to attend. South Africa is on edge ahead of a June 30 deadline which anti-immigrant groups have given for all undocumented foreigners to leave the country. Protests and potential civil unrest are expected, after weeks of sometimes violent xenophobic attacks. Four major unions including the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), which represents around 2 million people, said in a statement that workers would not be protected if they do not go to work on June 30. … ‘Removing foreign nationals from workplaces, communities or public spaces will not reopen factories, repair municipalities, strengthen public healthcare or create sustainable jobs,’ said the unions COSATU, FEDUSA, SAFTU and NACTU.” (06/17/26)
- US asks judge to halt first reparations program for black people in US
Source: The Hill
“The Justice Department is seeking to intervene in a federal lawsuit challenging a Chicago suburb’s housing reparations program for [b]lack residents, arguing it is ‘racially discriminatory’ and unconstitutional. The city council in Evanston, Ill., earmarked $10 million in revenue generated from cannabis sales taxes in 2019 for a first-of-its-kind local reparations program for [b]lack residents and their direct descendants who suffered housing discrimination due to the city’s policies and practices between 1919 and 1969. … The Justice Department has alleged that the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and the Fair Housing Act because it is ‘not narrowly tailored to remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination’ and public money is distributed solely based on race.” (06/17/26)
- US DOJ tries to block environmental lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI
Source: United Press International
“The Department of Justice is trying to quash a lawsuit against a power plant that supports an xAI data center and is arguing that the turbines are essential to national security. The suit, filed by the NAACP and several environmental groups against Elon Musk’s xAI, alleges that a power plant in Southaven, Miss., is operating without permits and violates the Clean Air Act. The plant powers the xAI Colossus 2 data center, which is over the state line in Memphis, Tenn. Colossus 2 supports the Grok artificial intelligence bot. The NAACP alleges that the power plant runs 57 turbines with no pollution controls, making it one of the biggest single industrial sources of smog-forming nitrogen oxide in the United States and a significant source of other harmful air pollutants like particulate matter and formaldehyde, disproportionately affecting vulnerable groups like children, older adults and low-income or minority households.” (06/17/26)
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2026/06/17/doj-elon-musk-xai-naacp/9421781703391/
- African & Commonwealth nations in Kenya urge quick execution of a key treaty protecting oceans
Source: SFGate
“African and Commonwealth nations called Tuesday for a swift implementation of a landmark treaty protecting the high seas, warning that despite record commitments to marine conservation, much of the world’s ocean protection still exists only on paper. The call to action was issued at the 11th Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, the first time an African nation has hosted the major annual event, which focuses on addressing critical ocean issues, including climate change, biodiversity and pollution. Hundreds of delegates from Africa, the United States, the European Union, and climate-vulnerable Caribbean and Pacific island nations are taking part in the conference, where leaders have sought to position Africa as a driving force in global ocean governance.” (06/16/26)
- US retail sales up a strong 0.9% in May
Source: Seattle Times
“Shoppers stepped up their spending in May and surpassed expectations as temperatures warmed and gasoline prices cooled. Retail sales rose 0.9%, up from a revised 0.4% gain in April, according to new Commerce Department data released Wednesday. Sales got a boost from generous government tax refunds in both April and May, though economists say that cash cushion is starting to fade. Excluding sales at gas stations, retail sales in May rose 0.7%. Spending was broad-based. Business at clothing, accessory and furniture stores all posted increases. Online sales rose 1.5%. There were a few weak spots. Electronics and appliance stores and department stores both registered slight declines.” (06/17/26)
- Somaliland: No Talks to Establish Israeli Military Base, Defence Minister Says
Source: US News & World Report
“There is no Israeli military presence in Somaliland and no talks about Israel opening a base there, Somaliland’s Defence Minister Mohamed Yusuf Ali told Reuters on Wednesday. Speaking on the sidelines of a business conference in Tel Aviv, he said Israel was training Somaliland’s military and police, but dismissed reports that Israel was in negotiations to establish a military base in the territory as ‘rumours.’ Michael Lotem, Israel’s ambassador to Somaliland, declined to comment. … Israel recognised Somaliland as an independent state last December, the first country to formally do so, in a move Somalia rejected and termed a ‘deliberate attack’ on its sovereignty.” (06/17/26)
- Japan: Regime raids ice cream giants over price-fixing allegations
Source: BBC News [UK state media]
“Japan’s competition watchdog has raided some of the country’s biggest ice cream makers for allegedly forming a cartel to raise the price of their products. Some of the firms, including Meiji and Pocky maker Ezaki Glico, said this week that they have been subject to an “on-site inspection” by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) over suspicions that they fixed the prices of frozen desserts. The JFTC said it is not releasing a statement regarding the investigation. The companies are suspected of inflating ice cream prices beyond increases in the cost of raw materials, even as the country faces a hot summer with record high temperatures.” (06/17/26)
- Trump cancels hearing for replacement intel chief Clayton
Source: Semafor
“Jay Clayton won’t be sitting for his confirmation hearing today to be President Donald Trump’s permanent director of national intelligence, after Trump said in an early morning Truth Social post that he wants Clayton’s replacement confirmed as the top US attorney in Manhattan first. The abrupt move is sure to rankle Senate Republicans, who moved quickly to schedule Clayton’s hearing to confirm him — and clear the way for passage of an extension of a key surveillance tool that lapsed as Democrats protested Trump’s pick of Bill Pulte for acting DNI. It also guarantees that the surveillance law won’t be renewed anytime soon. Trump also reiterated his demand that Republicans’ voter ID bill, the SAVE America Act, be approved along with the surveillance law despite Senate Majority Leader John Thune saying that can’t happen.” (06/17/26)
https://www.semafor.com/article/06/17/2026/trump-cancels-hearing-for-replacement-intel-chief-clayton
- Cuba: Communist Party convenes extraordinary session to debate new economic measures
Source: SFGate
“Cuba’s powerful Communist Party, or PCC, called an extraordinary plenary session Wednesday, days after President Miguel Díaz-Canel’s announced an economic reform package aimed at opening up the struggling island’s economy. Also Wednesday, in a surprise move, the National Assembly was also convened for Thursday to follow up on the party meeting. Both sessions come at a critical time for Cuba, as it grapples with the effects of a U.S. energy blockade aimed at forcing a change in the island’s economic model. The deepening economic crisis that has gripped Cuba for the past years — intensified by the energy embargo enacted under U.S. President Donald Trump — continues to disproportionately affect the island’s most vulnerable. Persistent blackouts, cuts to the state-run food ration system, and severe shortages of water and medicine have transformed daily life into an ordeal for many of the island’s nearly 10 million residents.” (06/17/26)
https://www.sfgate.com/news/world/article/cuba-s-communist-party-convenes-extraordinary-22309545.php
- Philippines: Senate president removed ahead of his Duterte’s impeachment trial
Source: ABC News
“A leadership standoff in the Philippine Senate ended Wednesday with the removal of an ally of former President Rodrigo Duterte as leader of the chamber, which will soon start the impeachment trial of his daughter, incumbent Vice President Sara Duterte. With 13 of 24 senators backing him, Sherwin Gatchalian, an ally of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., was elected Senate president. His rival, Alan Peter Cayetano, a key supporter of Duterte, conceded defeat. Both had claimed leadership of the Senate in the last two weeks based on contrasting legal interpretations of the quorum that led to their elections. … Control over the Senate is crucial. It’s expected to start the trial in July of the vice president, who was impeached by the House of Representatives last month over criminal charges, including unexplained wealth and publicly threatening to have Marcos assassinated.” (06/17/26)
- Trump in Defeat
Source: The Atlantic
by Jonathan Lemire“President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker — diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally. The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. … Trump won’t admit to any of this. He has spent recent days furiously spinning the tentative deal as a clear win, and has seethed at unflattering comparisons with the deal that President Obama struck with Iran more than a decade ago, aides and outside advisers told me.” (06/17/26)
- Tariff Math Doesn’t Work, and the White House Already Admitted It
Source: The Daily Economy
by David Clement“The Trump Administration’s initial demand for renegotiating the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) includes an opening position that vehicles covered by the deal be composed of at least 50 percent American-made components, in terms of dollar value. It’s a revealing concession, because if the goal is truly to manufacture everything in America, the threshold would be 100 percent, not 50 percent. As it turns out, executive orders cannot unwind a global economy. The White House’s concession should jump-start a more honest accounting of what their tariffs actually are: a consumption tax, paid by American households, spread across nearly every goods-producing sector in the economy.” (06/17/26)
https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/tariff-math-doesnt-work-and-the-white-house-already-admitted-it/
- Find better solutions without government
Source: Eastern New Mexico News
by Kent McManigal“I hear a lot of people saying the community should have this or that. Or pointing out things they believe should be improved. But they always seem to want government, or at least someone else, to provide what they want or to fix their problems. If you have complaints about the community, don’t wait for government to fix them. See what you can do for yourself, maybe with help from others, with or without government permission. Government wants you to depend on it for solutions, but its solutions can be worse than the original problem.” (06/17/26)
- Trump Bump Is a Welfare Increase
Source: Future of Freedom Foundation
by Laurence M Vance“This year’s [Social Security] COLA was 2.8 percent — the fifth straight year of a COLA at or above 2.5 percent. The COLA was called a ‘Trump bump’ because Trump’s tariff increases led to increased prices on certain goods, which increased the CPI-W, which increased the COLA. Retirement analysts are expecting an even larger ‘Trump bump’ next year due to the tremendous increase in fuel prices due to Trump’s war in Iran. … These ‘Trump bumps’ are nothing more than welfare increases that will be eaten up by inflation, higher premiums for Medicare Part B (which are deducted from Social Security checks), and taxes on Social Security benefits.” (06/17/26)
https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/trump-bump-is-a-welfare-increase/
- The University As We Know It Is Finished
Source: Persuasion
by Nils Gilman“Any reimagining of the university in the age of AI must begin with an honest reckoning with what AI cannot do — and what therefore becomes relatively valuable precisely because AI can do everything else. The key distinction is between work that AI does well (such as synthesis of known patterns, argument elaboration, template instantiation, and generating local coherence) and work it structurally cannot do because of the architecture of the technology as such. AI cannot build the trust on which institutional cooperation depends, because trust is not a conclusion reached by processing information about another agent but instead is a relationship constituted over time between persons who have staked something on each other, and who can be betrayed. AI cannot give a person good taste or style, because taste and style are about personal distinctiveness within a community which shares an aesthetic.” (06/17/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-multiversity-is-finished
- Everyone Should Be Free To Stay In or Get Out Of Social Security
Source: Town Hall
by Star Parker“Trustees of the Social Security program just issued their annual report. Each year, the picture of the program’s solvency is dismal. But this year it’s even worse. Rather than falling short in 2033, as reported last year, this year the shortfall is projected to be in late 2032. That’s six years from now. Without action taken, benefits, per the report, will be cut 22% late in 2032. That means that every young working person is now forced to pay, by law, 12.4% of their pay — half paid by them and half paid by their employee — into a bankrupt system. As I recall, this is a free country. So, the fault is ours. We, the voters, sit by and allow this to be done to us. Even if the system was not broken and could pay benefits as promised, it still is a horrible situation.” (06/17/26)
- Your financial records have no Fourth Amendment protections
Source: The Hill
by Jay Rogers“The protection that the framers wrote into our Constitution was not a general right to privacy. Rather, it was a specific warrant requirement for specific records — the same records that federal agencies can now reach through administrative subpoenas that require no judge’s signature. This is because of two key and relatively recent Supreme Court decisions. U.S. v. Miller in 1976 and Smith v. Maryland in 1979 replaced the Fourth Amendment’s requirement with a doctrine the Founders never intended. They established that information voluntarily shared with a third party loses Fourth Amendment protection.” (06/17/26)
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/5926033-financial-records-fourth-amendment/
- The US-Iran Deal Could Help Transform America’s Mideast Strategy
Source: The American Conservative
by Eldar Mamedov“The threat of war had preserved American leverage, and the waging of war destroyed it. So long as the prospect of the use of force remained ambiguous, Iran had to hedge. Once force was actually applied and failed to produce decisive results, Tehran learned that the United States could not achieve its maximalist objectives militarily. That knowledge permanently shifted the bargaining dynamic. But this outcome need not be seen as catastrophic. It can instead produce a realistic reassessment of American presence and partnerships in the Middle East.” (06/17/26)
- The Paradoxical Utopia of the World Cup
Source: Flagler Live
by Pierre Tristam“Simon Kuper is 56 now. His first memory of a World Cup, if not his first-ever vivid memory — for many of us who grew up outside the United States, the two are often the same — was the 1978 final between the Netherlands and Argentina. ‘I recall that night as vividly as almost anything else in my childhood,’ he writes in World Cup Fever. ‘A World Cup is like Proust’s Madeleine. Each new World Cup reminds you of past World Cups, and the people you watched them with.’ The book is a history of the World Cup through a few dozen madeleines. For Americans, it’s as good a guide as any to a tournament of paradoxes, this too-big-to-fail quadrennial festival of corruption, cheating, profiteering, nationalist chauvinism, and mostly crappy soccer that nevertheless can hypnotize and transport to a utopia of competition as idealized and convincing as Pelé’s deification of the sport as ‘the beautiful game.'” (06/17/26)
- Europe’s Digital Protectionism
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Cláudia Ascensão Nunes“When a government grants a monopoly in certain industries, it is protecting itself from competition it cannot control. The cost of that decision always falls on the people who depend on services that become more expensive, slower, and less innovative by decree. This is exactly what the European Commission proposed on June 3, 2026, this time applied to the digital infrastructure that supports hospitals, universities, public administrations, and businesses across Europe. It is called the Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA), and it is the centerpiece of the Tech Sovereignty Package. The logic behind it is protectionist: restrict who can compete, and guarantee market share for alternatives selected by the state.” (06/17/26)
- What would happen if US actually cut off military aid to Israel?
Source: American Greatness
by Connor Echols“As Israeli officials lash out against a preliminary deal to end the war in Iran, President Donald Trump is returning the favor. ‘I’m not happy with the way Israel has handled themselves with Lebanon,’ Trump said Tuesday. ‘Israel would have been blown up a long time ago had I not gotten involved.’ The comments represent a nadir in U.S.-Israel relations under Trump. The dispute is fundamental. Trump is determined to end the war with Iran, and Iran has made clear that a peace deal is only possible if Israel halts its operations against Hezbollah, an Iranian ally, in Lebanon. … Israel, for its part, believes its interests are best served by continued war with both Hezbollah and Iran, and it’s insisting that it won’t be bound by the terms of any deal negotiated between Tehran and Washington alone.” (06/17/26)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/us-military-aid-to-israel/
- Bipartisan JAWBONE Act Targets Government Censorship Threats
Source: Reason
by JD Tuccille“When the state is so big and intrusive that people need its permission to do everything from building a house to merging businesses, it’s easy for the lines to blur between conversations in which government officials merely voice preferences and those in which they twist arms to get their way. That creates room for partisans to defend ‘jawboning’ — government bullying of private parties to do what officials won’t or can’t do themselves — as nothing more than casual chats. The best way to handle jawboning is to strip government of power so it has little coercive leverage, and we should always work to do just that. Another good approach, embodied in legislation cosponsored by Sens. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and Ron Wyden (D–Ore.), is to make it easier to monitor government communications with private parties and to punish officials who cross the line.” (06/17/26)
https://reason.com/2026/06/17/bipartisan-jawbone-act-targets-government-censorship-threats/
- Winning Back the Working Class: To What, Exactly?
Source: Common Dreams
by Les Leopold“I recently attended a webinar sponsored by the Working Families Party, entitled Winning Back the Working Class. Everyone attending seemed to share the view that the working class has drifted away from the Democratic Party and that Democrats must change their messaging in order to win these voters back and prevail against MAGA Republicans. The presenters provided sophisticated polling analyses, looking closely at the issues that matter most to working-class voters and what turns them off about the Democratic Party. The bottom line was that the Democrats needed to put forward a strong, progressive economic-populist agenda. While I share the desire to derail MAGA in the coming elections, I find the ‘winning back’ framework problematic. For starters, why do Democrats need to be convinced that a progressive economic platform should be adopted?” (06/17/26)
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/working-class-independent-party
- Taxing the rich won’t save Social Security
Source: Washington Post
by Ramesh Ponnuru“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) greeted the news that Elon Musk had become a trillionaire by — what else? — touting a plan to raise federal spending and taxes. Musk ‘pays the same amount into Social Security as someone making $184,500,’ Sanders tweeted. He said his bill would ‘end that absurdity,’ eliminate the program’s shortfall for 75 years and pay for an expansion of Social Security benefits. … Sanders’s idea is terrible. It would be a much larger and more harmful tax increase than its supporters let on and would further warp the federal government’s already perverse spending priorities. … The tax cap is there to keep benefits related to contributions. Musk won’t pay any more than someone making $184,500, but he also won’t get a bigger check than that person.” (06/17/26)
- Florida House Blocks DeSantis AI Bill of Rights
Source: Karl Dickey’s Freedom Vanguard
by Karl Dickey“Not many people paid attention, but the 2026 Florida legislative session took an unusual turn with regard to AI regulation. The main issue isn’t whether AI should be regulated, but whether that should happen at the state or national level, or not at all. In Florida, lawmakers rejected Governor DeSantis’[s] ‘AI Bill of Rights.’ The Florida Senate supported DeSantis, but the House did not. When it comes to the Internet, how can a state control how its citizens use certain websites, especially when people can easily circumvent the rules? And I would posit that, even if one were in favor of regulating AI, we do not even know which regulation would be most prudent without inhibiting its positive impact on society. So far, it seems most regulatory proposals I have seen around the country, including in Florida, have been alarmist, reactionary, and driven by emotion rather than objective reasoning.” (06/17/26)
https://palmbeachexaminer.substack.com/p/florida-house-blocks-desantis-ai
- How the Left Convinced Young People That Wealth Is Taken, Not Earned
Source: The Daily Economy
by Holly Jean Soto“Frustration with high costs has made younger generations more receptive to claims that wealth requires exploitation. But envy-driven attacks only limit our future opportunities.” (06/17/26)
- Finding American Integrity
Source: Brownstone Institute
by Joe Murphy“Last week, Dr. Steven Quay published recommendations to improve the integrity of the nation’s biosecurity research following the Covid-19 crisis. Dr. Quay is a prominent figure in the resistance to the Covid-19 origins coverup in addition to his medical and academic pedigrees. His recommendations complement those of James Erdman, an Office of the Director of National Intelligence and CIA professional, who articulated before Congress in April that the government’s biosecurity apparatus is convoluted, clumsy, and unaccountable. I echoed similar comments in a prior piece from my perspective as a military officer also involved in countering the coverup. In the vein of Dr. Quay and Mr. Erdman’s recommendations, I offer further comments towards America’s Covid-19 post-mortem.” (06/17/26)
- Trump reindustrialization agenda faces its biggest hurdle: Americans
Source: Fox News
by Chris Johnson“Americans say they want to bring back industry. President Donald Trump ran on reindustrialization and won. But when it comes to actual building, mining, and developing, people too often shut it down. Build, they say, just not in my backyard. Peter Thiel put his finger on this pathology over a decade ago. ‘We wanted flying cars,’ he wrote, ‘instead we got 140 characters.’ His point wasn’t merely about venture capital timidity. It was about a society that stopped building physical things, retreating into digital abstraction while factories closed, supply chains migrated to China, and infrastructure crumbled. Now, we are making the same mistake again, in real time, with higher stakes.” [editor’s note: Actually, the US builds more “physical things” than it ever has before — it just doesn’t use as much human labor to do so – TLK] (06/17/26)
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/trumps-reindustrialization-agenda-faces-biggest-hurdle
- More doctors where they’re needed: Reforming Medicare’s GME formula
Source: Niskanen Center
by Lawson Mansell & David Schwartzman“At more than $21 billion annually, Medicare’s Graduate Medical Education (GME) payments are the federal government’s single largest investment in physician training, but the nearly 40-year-old formula for determining payments has not been meaningfully adjusted to address the growing mismatch between where doctors are needed and where they practice.” (06/17/26)
https://www.niskanencenter.org/more-doctors-where-theyre-needed-reforming-medicares-gme-formula/
- Look who’s losing it over Trump’s Iran deal
Source: Responsible Statecraft
by Jack Hunter“When Trump launched a war against Iran in late February, his MAGA movement suddenly became nearly indistinguishable from the neoconservative foreign policy Trump once abhorred. For nearly four months, Washington hawks like Senator Lindsey Graham and radio jock Mark Levin were riding high. But over time it became clearer that the president was looking for a way out and now the president has reportedly reached a memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the fighting, open the Strait of Hormuz, and to keep talking. Trump’s friends, who were hoping for Iranian capitulation and regime change, even if that meant indefinite bombing and blockading, aren’t very happy today.” (06/17/26)
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/trump-criticized-iran-deal/
- Progressive Dogma Is Fueling Academic Dishonesty
Source: Law & Liberty
by Eric Kaufmann“Nigel Biggar’s newest book exposes the ideological rot undermining higher education in the West.” (06/17/26)
https://lawliberty.org/book-review/progressive-dogma-is-fueling-academic-dishonesty/
- The Musk Trillionaire Panic Is a Distraction
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Connor O’Keeffe“The eye-catching dollar amounts reported as the net worths of the richest people in the world, like Elon Musk, are not large piles of cash sitting around in bank accounts gathering dust. They are mostly the present value of the companies they own. It is not even possible to tax or confiscate these assets without destroying most or all of the initial value. Figures like Warren and Newsom know this. But the implication that the rich are simply ‘hoarding’ trillions of dollars of wealth is useful to them. It feeds the impression that all of our economic problems are, in essence, problems with the distribution of final consumable wealth.” (06/17/26)
https://mises.org/mises-wire/musk-trillionaire-panic-distraction
- Arms and Accoutrements
Source: Independent Institute
by Stephen P Halbrook“United States v. DeBorba, decided on June 3, is the latest Ninth Circuit decision that seeks to exclude firearm parts from protection in the reference to the ‘arms’ that the people have a right to keep and bear. The court held that ‘‘optional accessories’ to firearms — such as gun slings, scopes, and, importantly, silencers — fall outside of the Second Amendment’s plain text because they are ‘accoutrements’ and not arms.’ The test for whether an object is included in ‘arms’ is supposedly based on whether it ‘is necessary to the ordinary operation of the weapon.’ ‘Ordinary’ means anything you want it to mean.” (06/17/26)
https://www.independent.org/article/2026/06/16/arms-and-accoutrements/
- Can Trust Exist Between the United States and Iran?
Source: Libertarian Institute
by Ted Snider“Iran was consistently and demonstrably in compliance with all their commitments under the agreement. It was Trump who broke faith, betrayed Iran and unilaterally and illegally pulled the United States out of the agreement. When, despite this history of nuclear negotiations with Trump, Iran returned to the negotiating table, the U.S. three times bombed Iran while negotiating. … Other negotiations with the U.S. have also taught Iran distrust.” (06/17/26)
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/can-trust-exist-between-the-united-states-and-iran/
- In New York’s “Commie Corridor”, a Race Over How to Build Power
Source: The American Prospect
by Whitney Curry Wimbish“To the casual observer, the two candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in New York’s Seventh Congressional District to replace retiring 16-term stalwart Nydia Velázquez may look indistinguishable. New York Assemblymember Claire Valdez and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso are both Democrats, and both intend to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), fund affordable housing, institute health care for all, and end Israel’s war on Palestine, which they agree is a genocide. Both candidates have substantial endorsements from powerful figures and organizations. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani backs Valdez, a fellow Democratic Socialists of America member, as do DSA-NYC and Justice Democrats; Rep. Velázquez, the New York Working Families Party, and state Attorney General Letitia James back Reynoso.” (06/17/26)
- First Amendment Needs Help!
Source: Common Sense
by Paul Jacob“The JAWBONE act would prohibit federal agencies from coercing or threatening online and other services into changing content and would give victims the right to seek damages. Now, you might be thinking, doesn’t the Constitution already prohibit the federal government from censoring us? Well, yes. It provides no exemption for government censorship implemented via plausibly (or implausibly) deniable delegation of the task. But we have had many legitimate debates about constitutional meaning. Further, we have also always had many illegitimate ones, in which people — including Supreme Court justices — seek to circumvent even the plainest and most unmistakable import of constitutional provisions.” (06/17/26)
https://thisiscommonsense.org/2026/06/17/first-amendment-needs-help/
- The Trillion-Dollar Alarm Bell
Source: CounterPunch
by David S D’Amato“Last week’s SpaceX IPO made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, despite the fact that the company has lost tens of billions of dollars since it was founded almost 25 years ago. Shares of the company climbed steadily after markets closed on Friday, pushing its market cap to $2.2 trillion. The public conversation about Musk’s vast wealth often obscures the fact that he is actually a very fancy welfare recipient, having taken billions of dollars from the public coffers by even the most conservative measures.” (06/17/26)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/06/17/the-trillion-dollar-alarm-bell/
- Starmer’s social-media ban will do huge harm to young people
Source: spiked
by Emma Gillan“Children and teenagers need more freedom, not less.” (06/17/26)
- So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, 06/17/26
Source: Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
“Stress-testing the limits of the First Amendment w/ Chaz Stevens.” (06/17/26)
- Rising, 06/17/26
Source: The Hill
“Lindsey Granger gives her lens on Vice President JD Vance’s recent appearance on ABC’s The View.” (06/17/26)
- Ron Paul Liberty Report, 06/17/26
Source: Ron Paul Liberty Report
“The Iran Deal – Who’s The Most Unhappy Now?” (06/17/26)
- Reason Interview: Matt Welch
Source: Reason
“What 1976 Got Right About America.” (06/17/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/06/17/what-1976-got-right-about-america/
- Reasonably Optimistic, 06/17/26
Source: Washington Post
“Is there such a thing as too much empathy?” (06/17/26)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/impromptu/is-there-such-a-thing-as-too-much-empathy/
- The Daily Blast With Greg Sargent, 06/17/26
Source: The New Republic
“Trumpworld Quietly Shivs JD Vance as Damning Leaks Discredit Iran Deal.” (06/17/26)
- The Political Orphanage, 06/17/26
Source: The Political Orphanage
“The Dark Side of Corporate Utopia: Pullman vs. Hershey.” (06/17/26)
https://politicalorphanage.libsyn.com/the-dark-side-of-corporate-utopia-pullman-vs-hershey
- Nonzero, 06/16/26
Source: bloggingheads.tv
“The US-China AI Race | Robert Wright & Ryan Fedasiuk.” (06/16/26)